A number of unrelated experiences over the past few years intersected recently and drove me to a new realization about organizational success:

Clients come in all shapes and sizes. Some are a veritable fountain that continually spews ideas and changes. This may seem like an enviable situation, but don't overlook the need for convergence to a solution.

One area of government where the Internet of Things (IoT) will have a big impact is in the administration and management of cities and other locales.

A good relationship between parties is critical to the success of any important contract. Although many may talk about the relationships between "parties," it's common knowledge (and common sense) that relationships are between people, not entities.

The list of mobile devices for enterprise use has expanded to include not just smartphones and tablets, but also wearable computers like smart watches, smart glasses, badges, and other devices (to this list you can also add drones, which I covered in "D

Let's start with the context for IT and business. Undoubtedly this year has seen continued turbulence in both IT and business. At the same time, the undercurrents of business concern for IT continue -- in terms of cost (too high), value (too low), and relationship ("those guys are different").

An ongoing challenge in development projects that you are "making up" as you go along -- that is, incrementally adding and adjusting features through sprints -- is that it can be difficult to know how much more you have to do to be "done." A great deal of thought and effort tends to go into the definition of done at a story and epic level in Agile,

The CIO has big problems to worry about. Intractable legacy challenges. Mobile devices in everyone's pocket. Then there's the cloud. On the one hand, new applications, increasingly powerful tools, and rising stakeholder expectations -- all within the context of constrained budgets -- lead the IT executive to focus on doing more with less. On the other hand, the complex, brittle mess of legacy continues to loom like some giant spider in a Middle Earth lair.

Cutter: In your new book, Analytics in a Big Data World: The Essential Guide to Data Science and its Applications, you discuss how to target and leverage business opportunities using big data and analytics. Could you expand on what these business opportunities might be?

In this Advisor, Ken Orr asserts that even though nonlinear thinking is not intuitive for everybody, it will help you understand how to get out of significant traps.

Dependably and accurately estimating the effort required to deliver against business requirements is a very important part of the Agile value proposition. Often, the early stages of Agile adoption are spent in large part coming to grips with the subtleties of estimation.

The phrase "Agile architecture" evokes two concepts:

Mobile devices and cloud computing continue to redefine basic concepts of IT and challenge the concepts taken for granted over the preceding decades. One of the issues in ferment today is that of defining access and providing secure and differential availability of computing resources to users as needed.

Most news coverage of drones focuses on their use by the military -- especially US forces in the Middle East, where they are used in combat and anti-terrorist operations. Amazon also managed to get a lot of free publicity around the 2013 holiday season when company reps suggested the company might use drones to deliver packages to consumers in the future.

Q: Why did one of the largest US chemical companies recently spend nearly US $1 billion to purchase a startup company focusing on applying big data analytics to weather forecasting?

A: To help agricultural companies take advantage of the integration of modern technologies!

Great conductors are known to be supremely confident: in their technique and in themselves. You can see the confidence when you watch video clips of giants like Mengelberg, Toscanini, Furtwangler, Kleiber, or Bernstein. Moreover, you sense their confidence when you listen to an audio recording of theirs: they are sure-footed with each and every note in the symphony they are conducting.

One of the great things about working with Cutter is the access to a lot of great information from really smart people -- and also the ability to have serious sessions with

The phrase "Internet of Things" (IoT) started appearing in 2009 and, as with most new concepts during their infancy, its definition has not yet stabilized.

Mobile devices and cloud computing continue to redefine basic concepts of IT and challenge the concepts taken for granted over the preceding decades. One of the issues in ferment today is that of defining access and providing secure and differential availability of computing resources to users as needed.

Many years ago I served as the Chairman of the Privacy, Confidentiality and Security Committee of what is now the National Association of State Chief Information Officers (NASCIO).

In my last Advisor (see "Can You Be 'Too Agile'?"), we considered the question: "Is it possible to be too Agile?" The question itself is a sign of Agile's successful adoption by businesses and their development teams.

Most of the news regarding privacy and wearable computers and camera-equipped devices like Google Glass has focused on the rights of individuals when it comes to being recorded in public places or commercial establishments like bars and restaurants.

In a recent Agile Product & Project Management Executive Update (see "Scrum's Value Proposition"), I talked about Scrum: what you can get out of it, what you won't get from it, and what you must put into Scrum to get its va

Social media monitoring excels when it comes to gathering rich customer feedback because consumers tend to elaborate when discussing products and services on social media networks and online forums.

In a prior Advisor (see "Something Is Happening Here"), I briefly described four megatrends shaping the world we live in. The topic of this Advisor, the end of anonymity, is worth a deeper look.